How Well Do You Know Your Potential Customer? 4 Strategies + 3 Data Driven Tools for Buyer Personas

Why it is important to define your target audience online

The starting point of any web marketing strategy is to define what the goal of your website is, called "conversion" in technical terms.

But once you understand what your goal is (whether it's to sell a product, as in the case of a site ecommerceor acquire contacts of potential customers as in the case of a Lead Generation), the next step is to figure out who your site visitors are potentially interested in accomplishing the conversion goal, i.e. define your target audience.

Your targets are people potentially interested in your product or servicein web marketing you often hear about the importance of understanding your target audience but there is more: only starting from the target you can define the most appropriate web marketing tools to reach people potentially interested in your product or service.

Let's take an example. Let's assume you have a ecommerce of tires.

Your conversion goal will clearly be to sell tires from your ecommerce.

What about your target audience? You could identify it with people searching on Google for "online tyre sales", which you could reach with a campaign Google Ads or a organic SEO positioning.

Whatever web marketing tool you choose, you can choose it right from choosing your target audience.

Defining the target of your web marketing activities is a fundamental action and preliminary even to defining the web marketing activities that you are going to carry out. But on the other hand, defining exactly who may be the people potentially interested in your product or service is often not so simple.

There is good news: to do this, we are helped by the Personas or Buyer Personas, archetypes, patterns that generalize different types of potential customers based on their demographic, psychographic, and behavioral tendencies, such as:

  • Place of Residence
  • Age
  • Sex
  • Civil Status
  • Interests
  • Values
  • Income
  • Employment
  • Education
  • IT Expertise

The creation of Buyer Personas, often common in the context of ecommerce sites, allows us to understand who our potential customers are, how they interact within our site and draw the relevant consequences, i.e. modify text, navigation and other aspects of the website according to the Characters who make purchases from your site.

In this article we try to understand:

  • how we can begin to elicit the target with Keirsey's 4 temperament theory;
  • How to define Buyer Personas with 3 practical web marketing strategies.

Keirsey's 4 Temperament Theory

A starting point in the elaboration of the Personas or Buyer Personas in your website or ecommerce can be the distinction made by David Keirsey in the '50s in the theory of the 4 temperaments, which divides into 4 archetypes, called Personas, the buying behavior: the logical character, impulsive, altruistic and aggressive:

4 Temperaments Keirsey Buyer Personas

Let's see them together and try to understand how they affect some aspects such as text, website navigation.

The logical character

Meticulous and methodical, the logician wants to understand every aspect of your product or service.

It needs descriptions that can be found in a practical and simple way.

The aggressive character

It is the archetypal ambitious, determined customer who seeks credibility and trust from the salesperson.

It needs elements that suggest credibility, advantages and benefits of your product or service.

The impulsive character

The impulsive character makes purchasing decisions with speed and immediacy.

Need bulleted lists, short paragraphs, and an easy way to complete the transaction.

The selfless character

The altruist is a character influenced by the opinion of others in purchasing decisions.

Need feedback and opportunity to share experience.

Here is summarized in the following diagram the 4 temperaments divided according to:

  • general characteristics;
  • behavior;
  • speed in the purchase decision;
  • the question that arises;
  • the practical application in your website;
4 keirsey characters

3 Tools to define Buyer Personas Data Driven

As we saw at the beginning, to accurately define your target audience in Buyer Personas, you need demographic and behavioral information.

You may ask yourself: where do I find them? The answer is often right in front of you, particularly in Facebook data and Google Analytics.

Let's look at 3 web marketing tools to define Buyer Personas based on data.

#1: Insights of your Facebook Page

Facebook Insights is the section of your Facebook Page where you can view a whole series of data on the performance of your Page, such as likes, coverage of status updates, engagement on the Page.

A first way to gather information about your Buyer Personas is through theAnalysis of the "likes", or likes, or fans of your Facebook Page with Facebook Insights.

Be careful though: for this data to be reliable, your Page should have likes that have grown naturally, even with Facebook Advertisingas long as you have chosen an appropriate profiling.

In fact, as much as Facebook Advertising can be considered the most reliable and effective tool for the growth of likes, the analysis of data related to Page likes may not be true, I'll explain why.

Let's assume you have a Facebook page. On the Page over time the number of likes grows. The people who clicked on the likes, did so because they found the Page interesting and clicked on it.

On the contrary, when you increase the number of likes with Facebook Advertising, it is you who "impose" on the tool a certain target, which is not necessarily your real target, especially if a preliminary analysis has not been done.

Here's how you can find helpful information to define your Buyer Personas with Facebook Insights.

First of all access your Facebook Page Insights and go to the "People" section:

facebook insights buyer personas

In this section you can note the demographics related to the likes of your Facebook Page, such as gender, age group, country, city of origin and language spoken divided according to:

  • of your fanspeople who like your Page;
  • of the people you have reached among your fans (and not)which is the number of people your post has been shown to in the last 28 days;
  • of the people involved, i.e. people who like your posts (or who have made some form of Reaction), who have commented or shared them or who have interacted with your Page, i.e. who have made some form of engagement on your Facebook Page.

Let's analyze these 3 items together with a view to creating Buyer Personas.

  • Fan data may not be as reliable for creating your Buyer Personas (because, as we mentioned earlier, you may have been growing likes on Facebook Advertising with the wrong targeting);
  • on the other hand, those related to people reached are very dependent on the Organic Reach of your status updates, i.e. how many and which people you manage to reach on your Page;
  • the third section, the one on People Involved, is in my opinion the most interesting to understand who are the people potentially interested in your products and services. In this section you can find out who actually interacts with your content, whether they make up the bulk of your likes or not.

Let's analyze the following graphs.

As you can see, the slice of women between the ages of 35 and 44 who like this Page is only 12%, a minority compared to, say, men between the ages of 25 and 34, who make up 24% of the Page's fans:

facebook insights buyer personas

However, if we go to see who actually interacts on the Page, we notice a strange phenomenon: women between 35 and 44 years old are among those who record the highest rate of engagement on the Page.

facebook insights buyer personas

What can we conclude from this analysis? That if we wanted to derive data on Buyer Personas from our Facebook Page Insights analysis we should think that they are:

  • women;
  • aged between 35 and 44;

#2: Facebook Advertising Audience Insights

Facebook Page Insights are not the only way to get information about our potential customers: it is possible to get useful information to define our Buyer Personas also with the Insights of the Facebook Advertising Audience.

Facebook Advertising's Custom Audience is a feature that allows you to find users on social media whose contact information you already have, such as an email, phone number.

How can we define our target audience with the help of Facebook Advertising's Custom Audience?

Let's assume you have emails, mobile phone numbers of your customers, people who have already purchased your product or service.

Once you've created a Custom Audience with this contact information, you can find out a lot of information about that contact list in the Audience Insights section.

If you don't yet have contact information for your customers, perhaps because you have yet to define the target audience for your business, you can still gain insight by entering certain information about your Ideal Audience.

To do this you first need to access the Audience Insights section:

insights into facebook advertising audiences

At this point you can decide whether View Audience Insights related to:

  • an Audience that you have already created, such as a list of your customers' email addresses or mobile phone numbers;
  • i visitors to your website; 
  • a Audience whose characteristics you are going to enter;
  • the Audience consisting of those who have clicked "like" on your Page;
insights into facebook advertising audiences

With Facebook Advertising Audience Insights you can discover data about your target prospects such as:

  • age;
  • sex;
  • romantic situation;
  • level of education;
  • professional title;
  • Pages that have clicked Like;
  • places;
  • used devices.
Audience Insights facebook ads

From this analysis we can find out, for example, that those who have an interest in the show "Masterchef" in Italy:

  • Is mostly male (would you have thought?) between the ages of 18 and 34;
  • he's married;
  • has a college education;
  • works in sales and administration;
  • also clicked likes on ironic pages about Masterchef like this one;
  • lives in Apulia;

#3 The Google Analytics Audience

A third method to understand the characteristics of our potential customers is the analysis of the Audience in Google Analytics:

Demographic data overview Google Analytics

By analyzing the Audience section you can discover useful data for defining Buyer Personas, such as:

  • age;
  • sex;
  • interests, divided into the traditional Display Network categories Affinity Categories and InMarket Segments;
  • languages and locations;

Conclusions

With the data collected through Facebook Page Insights, Facebook Advertising Audience, Google Analytics, and other methods like creating Buyer Personas with Pinterest, you'll have a wealth of information that you can sort through to create Personas, aka models, archetypes of your potential customers.

Exactly defining your target audience allows you to draw the necessary consequences for your site, in terms of text, communication, formatting.

How do you gather information about your target audience? Let's talk about it in the comments!

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